A blog about designing, creating, and painting wooden model soldiers for wargaming. These models are sometimes known as "craftees". To me, they are wooden warriors.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

British Light Dragoons

I found some pictures of the building process.

First, start with the standard pawn. To make them horse riders, their bodies will be shorter, as the legs will be painted onto the side of the horse, so you only need a pawn from about the hips up. So, take your mitre saw and shorten the pawns. (Save the pieces cut off.)

The pawn all the way to the left is the original. I cut both the tops and the bottoms off. The top cut makes putting the shakos on a bit easier. As you can see, I did not worry about making the height og each pawn exactly the same.

See my previous tutorial on making shakos, but note that because I have flattened to top of the pawn's head, I don't need to "scoop out" the inside of the shako to make it fit; it can also be a flat cut. Makes putting the two together much easier. Also, I filled the hole with a 1/4" flat head button plug. This saves me from having to use the Crayola modeling material.

We'll set aside the pawns for awhile (as I've run out of pictures), but you can pretty much just follow the previous shako tutorial. I used the same materials and techniques to add the peak, plume, etc.

Now let's look at the horse. At its core it is simply one spool for the body and to split eggs for the fore and back legs.

Note that I have flattened the bottom of the split eggs so that the model can stand on its own. Also this increases the surface contact area for gluing to the base.

To add a head to the horse, simply glue on another split egg. I flatten a spot on the split egg for the fore legs so increase the contact surface area, which helps create a strong glue bond. Then glue the fore and back leg pieces to a 1 1/2" disk to act as a stand.

Note that in my scale (42mm), this makes the infantry on 1" stands and cavalry on 1 1/2" stands. Keep this in mind for any rules you may write to use figures of this size.

I created a character by having a special horse in a rearing pose. As you can see in the figure below I trimmed some of the top edge on the rear of the spool and some of the bottom edge on the front of the spool so when the legs were glued on the back was naturally lower than the front, creating a rearing effect.

As I find more pictures I will post them. (Even though I am already violating my vow to put Wooden Warriors on the "back burner"!)